The Icarian

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The day before the last day of his life, Charles Dickens worked extra-hard writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his new novel.

On 8 June 1870, Dickens worked a full eight hours writing.

It was Dickens’ habit at the time to write for four hours each day. But that June day he worked eight straight hours in the top floor study of the prefabricated two-story Swiss chalet located across the road from his country mansion in Kent, Gads Hill Place.

He was desperate to finish the new novel. Dickens was on deadline. Literally, as it turned out.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood was slated for publication from April 1870 to February 1871 in twelve installments, less than Dickens’s usual twenty. Edwin Drood, a murder mystery, was half finished. Six installments were done when Dickens died.

A lot of money was on the line. Each Edwin Drood installment, illustrated by Luke Fildes, sold for one shilling – £7.45 or $9.47 in 2024 money. The serialized parts of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, were selling an average of 50,000 copies a month when he died – $473,500 USD, £372,500 in 2024 money, Louis Menand pointed out in a March 2022 book review in The New Yorker entitled, The Crisis That Nearly Cost Charles Dickens His Career.

By comparison, the serialized sections of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair — which became major books for these well-known authors — sold an average of 5,000 copies a month.

Dickens had a stroke the evening of 8 June. He died the next day, 9 June, at 6:10 pm, at Gads Hill Place. He was 58 years old.

The official version of what happened when Dickens had his fatal store is this: During dinner at his mansion, Gads Hill Place, he stood up and collapsed. His last words reportedly were “on the ground” when he was asked to lie down by his caretaker and sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth. A doctor was called. His treatment was infective. A leading neurologist, John Russell Reynolds, came from London. But he could not help Dickens.

Charles Dickens was a writing and working mo-chine. Dicken’s’ four-hour per day writing regimen was in addition to his many other activates and business obligations.

Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years. He wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles. He was a prolific letter writer.

Dickens was very theatrical. As a young man he flirted with a theater career. If television and movies existed in Dickens’s times, he would have probably a Hollywood hyphenate: a performer/writer/director/producer. He lectured and performed numerous readings. He had a mirror next to his writing stand and he would act out parts as he wrote.

He was a beloved figure, England’s greatest writer. He championed children’s rights, education, and other social reforms.

For decades he was an extremely busy man. He zealously guarded his public reputation and there was a reason for that.

Charles Dickens lived a dual life. The actual details of his death may differ from accounts by some biographers, in particular John Forster, who was a close friend who wrote the first Dickens biography.

In 1857, Charles Dickens met an actress, Ellen Ternan. Dickens was apparently smitten. He was 45, she was 18.

At the time, Dickens’s relationship with his wife Catherine was falling apart. Catherine married Dickens in 1836 and they had 10 children. Divorce would have been scandalous, out of the question for someone of his fame.

Catherine and Charles separated in June 1858 after she was accidentally delivered a bracelet and a note from Dickens that was intended for Ternan. Dickens gaslighted his wife, trying to portray her as a bad mother and mentally unstable. He attempted to get her committed to an insane asylum.

Dickens kept the relationship with Ternan secret from the general public despite the fact that Ternan and her mother often traveled with Dickens.

Ternan quit acting in 1860 and was supported by Dickens, living in homes he rented under assumed names. He reportedly called Ternan his “magic circle of one.”

Ternan is widely assumed to be Dickens mistress. However, a theory advanced by Brian Ruck published in The Dickensian, Winter 2022, claimed that Ternan was actually Dickens’s illegitimate daughter. Writer Peter Ackroyd contends there was no evidence that their relationship was consummated.

Dickens left a legacy of £1,000 to Ternan in his will, sufficient income from a trust fund to ensure that she would never have to work again.

It’s hard to imagine that the ongoing stress from the elaborate measures Dickens took to keep his relationship with Ternan secret didn’t have an effect on his already poor physical health.

In the summer of 1870, Charles Dickens was not a well man and had not been so for some time. By the time of his death, Dickens had a number of afflictions. These included addiction to laudanum, a mix of alcohol and opium, a pain killer that was both common and unregulated in 1870 England.

In his final book, Dickens demonstrates a familiarity with opiates. The opening chapter of Edwin Drood takes place in an opium den, the opening scene is an account of an opium hallucination.

Dickens developed at least 20 illnesses during his lifetime, according to the book Bleak Health: The medical history of Charles Dickens and his family, by Nicholas Cambridge. Few people, not to mention writers, have been as biographied as Charles Dickens. Not many people, even really famous ones, have books written just about their health history.

Bleak Health documents Dickens’s afflictions including chronic carbon monoxide poisoning, gonorrhea, tic douloureux, asthma, gout, a painful anal fistula and transient ischemic attacks. He is thought to have had epilepsy as a child and possibly throughout life.

He gave public readings that were unlike those of most authors. His readings were works of performance art that he put all his energy into, even when he was not well.

Dickens gave a series of “farewell readings” during 1868–69 in England, Scotland and Ireland, beginning on 6 October 1868. He was booked for 100 readings. He managed to perform 87.

He had a stroke on 18 April 1869 in Chester. He collapsed on 22 April 1869.

His physician warned him to cut back on work. He apparently did so for a few weeks, but his idea of slacking off was to begin work on a new novel.

The work he began was Edwin Drood, the book that would kill him.

Dickens health improved enough by late 1869 that he arranged, with his doctor’s approval, for a final series of readings. Dickens did this to partly compensate his sponsors for their losses due to his illness.

There were 12 performances between 11 January to 15 March 1870. The final show took St. James’s Hall, London. Though in poor health, Dickens read A Christmas Carol and The Trial from the Pickwick Papers.

Dickens’s last public appearance was at a Royal Academy banquet on 2 May, a tribute his deceased friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise that included the Prince and Princess of Wales as guests.

In her recently published book The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens, author Helena Kelly offers what has been called a controversial “radical reassessment” of the famous writer’s life. The version of his life presented to the public, primarily shaped by Forster’s 1872 three volume biography, was built on a foundation of elaborate lies, according to Kelly.

Kelly calls Forster’s work “an exercise in posthumous brand management.” Part of the management effort was hiding Dickens’s relationship with Ternan.

Shuttling between his home and that of Ternan’s may have played a role in his death after a long day of work. Dickens may not have been at Gads Hill when he had his stroke, as is described in the official version of events.

Biographer Claire Tomalin wrote in the 2011 book, Charles Dickens: A Life, that Dickens was actually with Ternan when he had had the stroke that would end his life. Ternan and her maids had him taken to his home Gads Hill so that the public would not know the truth about their relationship, according to Tomalin, who also wrote The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, published in 1991.

To this day the truth about Dickens’ relationship with Ternan remains elusive and obviously continues to generate controversy. Dickens and Ternan destroyed letters related to their relationship. The Dickens family, as well as Ternan’s sisters, carried any secrets to their graves.

There is nothing as mysterious as an unsolved mystery. The Mystery of Edwin Drood remains just that – a mystery.

Dickens left behind no outline or plan for the progress of the second half of Edwin Drood. In the 153 years since Dicken’s death, solving The Mystery of Edwin Drood by conjuring up a conclusion for the book has occupied numerous writers.

Despite all the scholarship and intense scrutiny, how Dickens would have ended the book that killed him, Edwin Drood, like the true story of his life and death, is something we simply do not know. It is a true mystery for the ages.

Books that Killed Their Authors is part of an intermittent series about writers who died before they completed or published their final book.

Karl Marx – Das Kapital: Books That Killed Their Authors #1

John Kennedy Toole – Books That Killed Their Authors #2

References and other mysterious Dickens reading:

Bleak Health – With Dr Nicholas Cambridge

https://youtu.be/M_2Di9XONi0?si=A2YIs4NtibDHw6fd

The medical journey of Charles Dickens, Lea Mendes, Lisboa, Portugal

https://hekint.org/2017/03/04/the-medical-journey-of-charles-dickens/

The Mystery of Ellen Ternan – Explore Charles Dickens’ relationship with the young actress

https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/ellen-ternan.html

The Mystery Around Dickens’s Death Dealing with the gaps in history

https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/the-mystery-around-dickenss-death/

The Enduring Mystery of Dickens’s ‘Dear Girl’

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-enduring-mystery-of-dickenss-dear-girl/